What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

No wonder our capacity for nuance and subtlety has been lost, as our opinions and ideals increasingly take the shape of fundamentalist religions. Poetry and art, expansive intellectual discourse, the odd unfiltered moment—these are either misinterpreted as moral litmus tests or else they’re upstaged by bold claims and extremist rhetoric.

A century ago, survival was the main event. Longing was an accepted part of existence. Today, the inability to achieve happiness or fit in with the herd is treated as a kind of moral failure.

“What should I be doing right now?” is a question that feels more urgent than ever. Face-to-face, real-time connection to others feels fraught and awkward compared to the safe distance of digital communication. We maintain intimate virtual contact with strangers but seem increasingly isolated from our closest friends and family members.

Having been raised on simple, emotionally reassuring answers to every question, we are made anxious by any attempt to take a critical look at the complex forces at play in the world.

We have to reject the shiny, shallow future that will never come, and locate ourselves in the current, flawed moment. Despite what we’ve been taught, we are neither eternally blessed nor eternally damned. We are blessed and damned and everything in between.

We are all—in our public lives, in our professional lives, and even in our personal lives—urged to grin along obediently like contestants on The Bachelor, hoping against hope that we win some mysterious, coveted prize that we can’t see clearly.

In other centuries (and in other lands), melancholy and longing were considered a natural part of the human condition. Now they are a moral failing, a way of signaling to the world that you’re a loser and a quitter. You have to change your attitude and play nicely with others, even if that means bullshitting your way through every interaction. Everyone wants to see you turn that frown upside down. Smiles, everyone, smiles! Like you mean it this time.

Sometimes I forget that I’m going to die someday, and then BuzzFeed reminds me that death is inescapable. Because in its frenzied onslaught of yellow “LOL”s and “fail”s and “10 Dogs Who Went as a Different Dog for Halloween” lies an existential evasion so strained that it can’t help inadvertently evoking the specter of mortality.

Even as depression and anxiety, or else simple dissatisfaction with the state of things, are as prevalent as ever, we are urged to get over these feelings, to recover from them, to bounce back quickly, or else to conceal them. To do otherwise is to embrace the “fail.” You are not following the rules. Start acting like a happy winner or you might become a depressed loser forever.

The latest news, whether upbeat or ominous, was reported in the same manic, excitable tone, one that was utterly out of sync with my dark emotional state. Sadness is a lonely thing in America. Taking time to reflect means acknowledging that you were once sad, or that you lost something along the way that you might never get back.

Nearly religious positivity in the face of doom lies at the heart of the Disney brand, after all—which

Somehow, the little things—the eavesdropped-on conversations, the tense family dynamics—take on a special kind of heaviness when you’re visiting Disneyland. As Joseph Conrad put it in Heart of Darkness, “They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.” The semi-hypnotic state of helplessness you enter is central to the experience of Disney. All of your membranes become porous; the sadness can enter your bloodstream directly. You are removed from all familiar signifiers, and it makes you all the more vulnerable. You are trying to be a good parent, but there you are, defenseless, in a vast sea of human beings, huddled in their desperate gaggles, squabbling, regretful, sweating profusely, scarfing Mickey Mouse–shaped beignets and cups of frozen lemonade and hot dogs bathed in oily chili, all of them simultaneously beating back that inevitable feeling of melancholy that comes from being at The Happiest Place on Earth, and discovering that they’re deeply, inescapably unhappy.

I behaved in the paradoxical manner of a trapped animal who suddenly becomes aggressively confrontational: I leaned in—way in, beyond reason.

Each return trip kicks up soothingly familiar memories of the trips that came before it. Which is exactly how Walt Disney wanted them to feel. As Neil Gabler points out in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, this escapist slant was apparent in the park’s promotional brochures. “[W]hen you enter Disneyland, you will find yourself in the land of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy,” one brochure declared. “Nothing of the present exists in Disneyland.”

The drummers and the dancers and Mickey and Minnie appeared to be having some kind of peak experience, but the crowd was a sea of blank faces, as if they weren’t there at all. And like that, the spell was broken. I began to notice the details that had until then escaped my attention. I saw the metal railing that encircled the grass. The grass is for viewing, it suggested, not for touching or playing or lounging on. According to Gabler, Disney imagined “a Main Village with a railroad station and a village green…a place for people to sit and rest; mothers and grandmothers can watch over small children at play.” This town square was not a village green, I saw now, but a stage set—a gorgeously designed sea of hot cement graced by a smattering of small trees. A few feet away, a man in a blue Disney shirt was scanning the crowd and mumbling into his walkie-talkie. This spontaneous community celebration was a carefully choreographed, rigidly scripted corporate spectacle. My family and I were manipulated into thinking we were part of something incredible. We thought we were special, but we were not.

Having complete and total control over every single aspect of your experience, including everyone around you, is the textbook definition of alienation—precisely how human beings are severed from each other and from their own humanity.

I might’ve imagined I would land somewhere like that eventually. Or maybe I suspected that I would never be worthy of that kind of a life. Either way, I probably should have cultivated more empathy for that man, who was so clearly in a lot of pain. But I still remember how good it felt to smash the handset of my phone into pieces. I hadn’t even moved in yet and I was already furious. I was in love and I already hated the guy. I knew I shouldn’t move in with him. But it almost felt satisfying to hate him. My disappointment had a clear source. I would try to make things perfect and I would fail, over and over again. I couldn’t just love someone and be loved back. That was too easy. That didn’t feel right. I was more familiar with dissatisfaction. I was more at home with longing. As I moved my things into that dusty, tiny, haunted house, I looked around and thought, “This will never be enough.” It was exactly what I wanted.

I just really love food,” earnest foodies will confess, seemingly unaware that most of humankind shares their passion),

Or as Nora Ephron succinctly put it in her 2006 New Yorker essay, “Serial Monogamy,” “This was right around the time that arugula was discovered, which was followed by endive, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisée, which was followed by the three M’s—mesclun, mâche, and microgreens—and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the past forty years from the point of view of lettuce.”

Sometimes I go to parties filled with mature people who know things and act their age and I’m quickly filled with despair.

But they’ve accumulated enough experience over the years to realize that the more appropriate thing is to resist such an impulse, to file down their more unsightly edges, to blend in. It’s not that they don’t still have unpopular opinions and bad urges. They’re just mature enough to know these things make people uncomfortable, end friendships, hijack careers. You can’t go to a party and act like you’re at a party. You’re too old for that. You might speak out of turn or contradict yourself or offend someone. That’s not how adults do it.

I can’t do it. The quiet restraint, the lack of discernible needs or desires, the undifferentiated sea of dry-cleaned nothingness, the small sips, the half-smiles, the polite pauses, the autopilot nodding. It feels like we’re all voluntarily erasing ourselves, as if that’s the only appropriate thing to do.

And the experience of reading Kondo’s books does induce a kind of pulsing magic. Her optimistic but precise prose and her stubborn insistence that things have feelings (Your bunched-up stockings are insulted by their unjust treatment at your hands! Your coat appreciates a little thanks for keeping you warm every day!), combined with her lifelong passion for total control over her environment, have a unique way of inciting a truly life-changing bout of cathartic junk-purging. It’s not that things aren’t important, it’s that some things are incredibly important and other things are literal garbage, garbage that keeps you from appreciating your most treasured possessions. Kondo convinces us that we carry around these mountains of trash with us only because we’ve been tricked into feeling guilty about letting them go.

Imagine Southwest Airlines changing their slogan from “Wanna get away?” to “What are you running from?”

The question isn’t whether or not your stuff sparks joy. The question is: Can you spark joy all by yourself? Do you remember how that feels?

When I take my dad’s wallet out of my desk drawer and hold it in my hands, it brings me what the Japanese would call mono no aware, which translates literally as “the pathos of things” but means more broadly, “a melancholic awareness of the transience of existence.” My father’s wallet reminds me that nothing lasts. Just when you’re starting to get comfortable, you disappear. And maybe only one or two of your things will seem important to someone else when you’re gone. That’s sad, but it’s also a reason to wake up to the enormity of the moment, to the unbelievable gift of being alive, right now. You don’t need more than this. All of heaven is within you.

A window into the unimaginable lifestyles of the super-rich now lives in our pockets. Luxury feels more immediate and more attainable than it ever has before—and this makes it all the more unnerving.

Instead of striving for a life that could somehow match the clean beauty of an image from Instagram or the blurry glory of a trailer for an orgiastically great concert that could never happen, imagine striving for a way to encounter the small details of everyday life as if they were unexpectedly delightful. Isn’t that how luxury is supposed to feel, after all? Luxury means being able to relax and savor the moment, knowing that it doesn’t get any better than this.

My mom liked eccentric more than she liked nice.

The future turned out to be just as incredible as I imagined it would be when I was little. But these days, I just want to slow down. I want to pull the shutters closed and block out the world. I want to spend hours gluing things together. I want to fill my house with tiny bits of collected junk. The more I have, the more I realize that all that matters is the small discoveries, the little interactions, the improvised, messy, glued-together moments that lie at the center of our happiness. Everything else is just a distraction.

But in 2017, it felt as if an increasingly grotesque subspecies of infantile beast had escaped the screen and invaded our real lives. Suddenly, we found ourselves wondering: Does the world even feel real to powerful men? How else do two world leaders with nuclear weapons capable of murdering millions trade juvenile insults on Twitter like kids battling over a video game? What else makes it seem tempting to break a window in a hotel tower and point one of forty-three assault weapons at a crowd below, as Stephen Paddock did in Las Vegas in October 2017, killing fifty-eight people before turning the gun on himself? And unbelievably enough, no one seemed prepared to take action to prevent more harm. Were we really going to hold our collective breaths and watch these angry men determine our fates? How was this reality?

An external mob is watching and judging and withholding approval. It’s impossible to matter, to be interesting enough. Many young people describe others as “a better version of me.” This is how it feels today to be young and fully invested in our new popularity contest: No matter how hard you try, someone else out there is taking the same raw ingredients and making a better life out of them. The curated version of you that lives online also feels hopelessly polished and inaccurate—and you feel, somehow, that you alone are the inauthentic one.

Not only do many of us now expect to make money at creative careers that used to be seen as the poverty-stricken purview of a small handful of artists, but we also expect to establish a name for ourselves quickly, to find our work deeply satisfying, and to become famous overnight—or at least to have tens of thousands of followers. This pervasive, subconscious longing is the background noise generated by the new digital realm, like the terrible hiss and hum of an old refrigerator. And it affects all of us, even if the pain it causes is most visible in the young. It tells us that no matter what our circumstances might be, we should be dressing like fashion bloggers and vacationing like celebrities and eating like food critics and fucking like porn stars, and if we aren’t, we’re losers who are doomed to non-greatness forever and ever.

But I also want to say to them, time after time, that there is no “better version” of you waiting in the future. The best version of you is who you are right here, right now, in this fucked-up, impatient, imperfect, sublime moment. Shut out the noise and enjoy exactly who you are and what you have, right here, right now.

What is youth, but the ability to nurse a superiority complex beyond all reason, to suspend disbelief indefinitely, to imagine yourself immune to the plagues and perils faced by other mortal humans? But one day, you wake up and you realize that you’re not immune.

Jackson felt alienated and emotionally starved. She had difficulty trusting people. And with her husband pursuing an ongoing affair with her close friend, who could blame her? No wonder so many of Jackson’s works conjure a slow, simmering resentment that becomes almost hallucinatory, as if years of muting emotional reactions naturally warp perception, fueling a state of delirium.

But for those of us who retain some sense memory of twirling and hearing others coo, spotting the word “girl” in every other title these days (Girls, Gone Girl, 2 Broke Girls, The Girl on the Train, The Girl Before, New Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to name just a few) can bring on a faintly nostalgic twinge. Or is it a shudder? We recall that privileged but exasperating era when we were transfixing and special but also a little doomed. As a girl, you are a delicate glass vase, waiting to be broken. You are a sweet-smelling flower, waiting for life’s hobnailed boots to trample you. That built-in suspense is part of your appeal.

While so many aspects of the green movement—farmers’ markets, composting, gray water, solar power—represent commendable efforts to improve life within a community, there’s a spirit of separatism that can’t be disentangled from these things. The allure of hard work and self-reliance, when paired with a distrust for modern institutions, can curdle into an impulse to divest from society altogether. Whether this impulse is manifested in the suspicions of disaster preppers or the purism of the homeschooler, there’s a sense that the more independent you are, the safer you are, that total control of our environments is the ideal, and that the institutions designed to protect us might be those from which we require protection. But our fear of the “other” is also more mundane than that. It’s a way of choosing the inconveniences of self-reliance over the indignities and sacrifices of compromise. Perhaps it’s better (this thinking goes) to acquire the skills to face down a hungry bear in the woods or trudge through the snow to buy a few bolts of calico than it is to expose your child to a teacher who doesn’t inspire her, or to a doctor who doesn’t listen closely enough. That’s a pastoral fantasy that easily overshadows our hunched, bleary-eyed, flickering-screen lives—but the fantasy is also a product of those lives, which create awkwardness and fear of direct confrontation in a population unaccustomed to face-to-face contact, accommodation, and collaboration. But most of all, this d...

hacks—sly methods of disrupting other people’s resources for the sake of your own.

In other words, at this late date in human history, it would behoove most of us to think less like gurus and more like artists—deeply connected to ourselves and each other, painfully, beautifully aware of reality, and exquisitely alive to the moment—in order to build a new world outside of the toxic illusions of this one.

Even natural wonders aren’t what they used to be, because nothing can be experienced without commentary. In the 1950s, we worried about how TV would affect our culture. Now our entire lives are a terrible talk show that we can’t turn off. It often feels like we’re struggling to find ourselves and each other in a crowded, noisy room. We are plagued, around the clock, by the shouting and confusion and fake intimacy of the global community, mid–nervous breakdown.

Many of us learn to construct a clear and precise vision of what we want, but we’re never taught how to enjoy what we actually have. There will always be more victories to strive for, more strangers to charm, more images to collect and pin to our vision boards. It’s hard to want what we have; it’s far easier to want everything in the world. So this is how we live today: by stuffing ourselves to the gills, yet somehow it only makes us more anxious, more confused, and more hungry. We are hurtling forward—frantic, dissatisfied, and perpetually lost. Our bewildered state doesn’t just injure us individually; it impedes our ability to work together for a better world. We can’t stand for justice and effect change until we’ve learned to push away empty temptations, shiny dead ends, and trivial distractions. As long as we’re perpetually assaulted by a barrage of news and tweets and texts, as long as commercial messages and smooth brands and profit-minded discourse are our only relief from our insecure realities, we’ll never develop the ability to live in the present moment. We have to cultivate compassion for ourselves and each other. We have to connect with each other in genuine and meaningful ways. But we also have to relearn how to breathe in the late summer air and feel the sunshine, to admire the swelling pink clouds and shut out the hiss of truck brakes, to sit on the ground and look up at the trees without looking ahead to what we’ll post on Facebook about it. You can have y...

We are encouraged to believe in our dreams, but we are assumed to dream in the same limited palette as everyone else.

We are living in a time of extreme delusion, disorientation, and dishonesty. At this unparalleled moment of self-consciousness and self-loathing, commercial messages have replaced real connection or faith as our guiding religion. These messages depend on convincing us that we don’t have enough yet, and that everything valuable and extraordinary exists outside of ourselves.

So instead of passionately embracing the things we love the most, and in so doing reveal our fragility and self-hatred and sweetness and darkness and fear and everything that makes us whole, we present a fractured, tough, protected self to the world.